The Internet turns everybody into a linguist, the
same way it turns us all into medical diagnosticians and tracers of
lost persons. Counting words has become a favorite way to track a
trend, uncover a hidden meaning, or cut a long text down to size.

So when the House Democrats' 1900-page healthcare
bill was published, critics on all sides took to counting up its words,
whether or not that actually meant anything. A feminist group faulted
the bill for containing only eight mentions of "women" -- which
was true, but then it doesn't mention "men" even once. And opponents of
the bill tried to distill it to its coercive essence by noting that the
word shall appeared in it over 3000 times. As the House Minority Leader
John Boehner explained
it, "Shall, that means, 'you
must do,'" while the New York Post's
Charles Hurt said
it showed the feds were telling people what to
do on every page.

But a shall-count in
the thousands isn't out of line for a major bill
from either side of the aisle -- there are more than 2000
in the
prescription drug bill the Republicans passed in 2003. And the vast
majority of staturory shalls spell out the obligations of the
government, not the people. In fact, shall
gets a bum rap, considering how crucial it is in safeguarding our
freedoms.
Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech; the right
to bear arms shall not be infringed; nobody shall be deprived of life,
liberty, or property without due process... -- page for page, shall is three
times as frequent in the Constitution as in
the House healthcare bill. Of course critics of the bill are still free
to insist that it usurps our basic
freedoms and opens a new fast lane on the road to serfdom. But that
isn't something you can prove just by counting helping verbs.

It's that same craze for counting that moves
commentators to tally first-person pronouns when they want to
demonstrate someone's narcissism. During the 2008 campaign, Frank Rich
used that method to tag Hillary Clinton and John McCain as pompous
egomaniacs. And after Sarah Palin's speech resigning the Alaska
governorship, the Wall Street Journal's Peggy
Noonan pointed to Palin's
predilection for using I and
described her as "self-referential to the
point of self-reverence. 'I'm not wired that way,' 'I'm not a quitter,'
'I'm standing up for our values." I'm, I'm, I'm."

But nobody's pronouns have come in for as much
critical scrutiny as Barack Obama's. In Newsweek, Howard Fineman counted
the pronouns in the President's UN speech and
concluded that
he's too impressed with his own aura. Othercolumnists
have sounded
the
same note. George Will said
that Obama was "inordinately fond of the
first-person singular pronoun" and described
him as ego-tripping when
he used those pronouns 26 times in his speech to the Olympic Committee
in Copenhagen.

But everybody uses those pronouns a lot -- they
account for around six percent of the words in our everyday
conversation. The
question is whether Obama uses them any more than other politicians do.
At the blog LanguageLog, the University of Pennsylvania linguist Mark
Liberman compared
the transcripts of Obama's press conferences with
those of his three presidential predecessors. It turned out that
Clinton and the two Bushes all used first-person pronouns anywhere from
50 to 70 percent more often than Obama does. And Obama used the
pronouns less
frequently than that in the Copenhagen speech that Will
saw as the peak of presidential preening. (His inaugural address
also used fewer first-person pronouns than those of his predecessors.)

Stanley
Fish took up same motif in the New
York Times. He counted the
first-person singular pronouns in Obama's speech on the General Motors
bankruptcy and announced that it signaled the emergence of an "imperial
I," in contrast to the deferential we's
and you's that Obama had used
in his nomination acceptance speech and his victory speech in Grant
Park.

Of course you could argue that it's natural for a politician
to use we
and you more often in a
speech thanking political supporters than in
one explaining a policy decision that he's taking responsibility for.
But even so, Obama actually used those
first-person pronouns less
frequently in the GM speech than he did in his speeches in Grant Park
or at the Democratic convention.

To Liberman, those misperceptions suggest that Will
and Fish are suffering from what psychologists call confirmation bias.
If you're convinced that Obama is uppity or arrogant, you're going
to fix on every pronoun that seems to confirm that opinion. But you
can't help thinking there's a measure of projection here, as well. Will
and Fish are neck and neck for the most immodest style in all of
American
prose, and it's not surprising that they'd read Obama's impenetrable
self-possession as the sign of a bristling ego. When you're a
narcissist, every doorknob becomes a mirror.

But the real error here isn't in overestimating
Obama's self-references (and by the way, Palin doesn't
use I and me
disproportionately, either). It's in assuming the raw frequency of
those
pronouns says anything at all. True, that association has a long
history: the word egotism
orginally referred just to the overuse of I.
But the great majority of people's self-references actually signal
deference or modesty, not conceit. They're what the psycholinguist Jamie
Pennebakercalls
"graceful I's": "I suppose," "I see," "I wonder
if..." Those are a far cry from the self-assertive, sledgehammer I's at
the other end of the scale: "I shall return," "I'm the decider," "Make
my day, punk!" (According to Pennebaker, Obama's first-person singular
pronouns are overwhelmingly "gentle I's.")

I'd be the last person to disparage the usefulness
of counting words -- the quantitative research made possible by the
Internet and computational tools have transformed the way we do
linguistics. But one thing we linguists know is that counting words
isn't very revealing if you aren't listening to them, too.